Recently Kyle blogged about "The Google PageSpeed Insights Code Has Been Cracked" to let folks know that website speed, efficiency, and the experience that people have on your website has a profound impact on how well your website does...and we're extremely aware of this.

Today I am excited to let you know that we have just raised the bar in terms of Managed WordPress Hosting. Our goal with this project that we began working on 9 months ago, was to deliver the fastest WordsPress websites in the world.

So, we put our thinking caps on, determined what was out there, why it doesn't work well, and developed new hardware that could deliver the absolute fastest and BEST website experience for website owners, visitors, and Google!

As Kyle mentioned in his post there are many "caching" and "optimization" plugins out there that do a very mediocre job of speeding up WordPress websites. The problem with them is that they are software based, and they do not address the fundamental issue of server load caused by WordPress its self.

Every time WordPress loads for someone to see it a page on your website, the following things have to happen:

PHP has to be running and it has to do the work to render your pages or posts, it also has to run any plugin code that you have installed on top of the core WordPress system.

MySQL (your database) has to be queried many times, probably 50-100 times just to visit a single page. This creates latency and un un-avoidable overhead.

APACHE - the web server has to load in order to serve every request to pages and posts. This is very inefficient.

With this major update to the SiteRubix Hosting Platform here at WA, you can feel confident that you can now TURN OFF the following:

Caching plugins

You can disable or turn off JavaScript and CSS minimize plugins

Any plugins related to website SPEED can be disabled.

Without going into the technicalities any further, I'm going to get right into what WE are doing here at Wealthy Affiliate with our SiteRubix website network...here goes...

Today I am excited to introduce to you one of our biggest and most important updates to our SiteRubix website network ever!

Introducing SiteSpeed!

SiteSpeed was built to improve not only your website performance, but the performance of your WordPress server environment. SiteSpeed is a website caching platform that sits in front of your website and your website server.

When I say "Caching", I mean that it's a platform that saves static versions of your website pages and posts. It's an extremely fast, scalable, and robust server (hardware) which all requests to your website are handled. This server is able to serve web pages at lightening pace, literally responding to the requesting browser near instantly.

This is similar to services like CloudFlare, among others, but it's built right into your websites here at Wealthy Affiliate. It can also handle a lot of traffic, much more than any Web server could without bowing up!

SiteSpeed keeps real-time versions of your website which it can deliver to browsers in hundredths of a second, thus preventing the request from ever even hitting your website's server.

This technology is VERY SMART. When updates are made to your website which could affect what it looks like, SiteSpeed detects this and it updates the files that it sends to people's browsers.

What this means is that unlike many of the plugins out there which serve slightly out-of-date versions of your website to people browsing - SiteSpeed delivers your website in REAL time, exactly what your site would look like if SiteSpeed were turned off.

So... I've been a bit "techie" here and before I move forward I want to give you a diagram to show you how SiteSpeed works.

The Vast Array of Benefits with SiteSpeed

Beyond the benefits of SiteSpeed drastically improving your website load times, you will also score extremely high with Google! This is a big deal and it's a metric that Google uses when ranking sites. A fast loading website that is always up to date is going to offer the best possible user experience for both Mobile and Desktop users. Google knows this and they take this into account when placing sites into the SERPS.

I won't repeat what Kyle mentioned on his post last week too much here, but Google Page Insights will typically rank a WordPress website in the 60s for Mobile and 70s for Desktop. In many cases it's in the 30s for Mobile and 40s for Desktop. With SiteSpeed your website will have a framework in place to deliver high 80s and 90's for both Mobile and Desktop Page Insights tests.

Performing well for your website visitors is KEY, and it's great to score extremely high with Google PageInsight tests. However, there are added benefits to our SiteSpeed platform.

Bots & Crawling Loads Minimized to Nothing.

Did you know that bots (including the Google Bot) can play a huge role in how well your website loads? When your website is being crawled by bots for indexing, or other reasons, your site is essentially being loaded each time it is requested by these bots.

This puts a lot of strain on your site and other sites on any one of our hosting servers. SiteSpeed eliminates this issue by serving cached pages at the SiteSpeed level, long before your website's server is even loaded. It's truly amazing to be able to say that we are serving real-time and up to date web pages and posts via a hardware traffic handler that runs independently.

Traffic Attacks (DDoS) Fended Off by SiteSpeed.

Denial of service attacks happen from time to time. They happen when someone (or some group), sends a huge burst of visits to your website with the intention to overwhelm your servers and essentially deny your website from loading.

SiteSpeed and the hardware component of it is much more robust and able to fend of DDoS attacks. Your website is going to be operating on servers which have mitigated the risk of a DDoS attack harming your (or other people's) website(s) on any given server.

So, how about the cost of SiteSpeed?

The cost of SiteSpeed is something that we sat down to think about long and hard. There are software plugins out there charging upwards of $50 per installation, per website, to offer website "speed" improvement that pales in comparison to the SiteSpeed platform here at WA.

SiteSpeed comes with a price tag of exactly....ZERO dollars and is going to be available to all PREMIUM members of WA.

We see a need for SiteSpeed, it's going to drastically improve rankings, improve up time, improve visitor perception of sites, and improve our SiteRubix WordPress web hosting network on whole.

Beta Release is Today (May 1st, 2017)!

Today we are rolling out the SiteSpeed beta program. This is going to allow the first 100 200 or so people who would like to be involved, to turn SiteSpeed ON for any one of your websites hosted here at WA.

To get access to SiteSpeed right now, simply leave a comment on this post and we'll grant you access within a few minutes.

If you are one of the first 100 200 folks, you can follow these simple instructions, to toggle SiteSpeed ON or OFF.

Click on "Details" for the website you wish to turn SiteSpeed "ON" for.

On the Details page, scroll the page down to SitePlus

Look for the SiteSpeed toggle button.

Simply toggle the SiteSpeed button to the ON position

One thing to keep in mind is that when you are logged into your website as an ADMIN user, that you will not see SiteSpeed working unless you logout, or use a different browser. In other words, SiteSpeed is not used when logged into your site :)

Preferably, before you turn SiteSpeed ON, you should disable any other caching plugins you have. SiteSpeed works with other caching plugins, but to get the full effect of our SiteSpeed infrastructre, you will want to have it running on it's own without caching plugins like WP Fastest Cache, WP Total Cache etc...

Testing in Google Pagespeed

SiteSpeed works by serving a request of any given page or URL on your website first, then on the second, third, 1000th request of that page, the SiteSpeed (cached) version of that page is used. So, if you're using Google Page speed insights you may have to click "Analyze" twice.

Issues? - This is a beta remember...

We've tested, and tested, and tested some more with all kinds of WordPress themes, with all kinds of plugins etc, but we obviously can't test every single plugin or theme out there.

If your site has SiteSpeed turned on and it doesn't function in the way you want, simply toggle SiteSpeed OFF. Then we would request that you let us know about the problem by contacting SiteSupport.

So, today we've officially released SiteSpeed in Public Beta form. If you are a Premium member and leave a comment below, we will grant you access to toggle on for any of your websites. We've been extremely happy with what we've been able to achieve with SiteSpeed, and this is just the beginning. We're already in the works of SiteSpeed Version 2.0!!

We truly cannot wait to get your feedback on SiteSpeed and how it works for you and your website.

Leave us a comment below saying "I WANT THE BETA" and join the SiteSpeed BETA.

Carson

**** UPDATE June 1, 2017 ****SiteSpeed results have been extremely successful and we are confident in allowing everyone who leaves a comment on this post to have BETA access. If you've left a comment requesting access to the BETA, you've already got it, and for those wanting access, please just leave a comment!

This is really awesome and will help us in a great way. It is so good to see all of the amazing things that are happening here at WA. WA has one of the best platforms ever when it comes to building an online business. WA is simply the best.

I have a couple of questions. I was having some trouble with my site and I made some changes to my theme's "style.css" file. I made a change to the site title's font-size.

With SiteSpeed activated, these changes are not showing up live on my site (at least on mobile). SiteSupport told me to deactivate SiteSpeed and see if that would help. They said SiteSpeed must not be compatible with my theme. I am using Modern Studio Pro from Studio Press (Genesis framework).

When I deactivate SiteSpeed, the changes do show up. I have really noticed this on mobile. It seems to be hit or miss from a laptop. I don't know what role the device plays.

If you are having issues with Site Speed then turn it off for now. This is not required nor mandatory for your site to do well. You can instead use W3 Total Cache to turn on many optimizations. Yes, yes, it is a plugin, but a good one. From what you are describing it could seem SiteSpeed is affecting mobile CSS and it somehow discards changes you have made. I hope this helps.

W3 Total Cache is very comprehensive with many options. It supports minification, GZIP, and CDNs. They are all good competing products with high reviews, but W3 Total Cache has more installs, over 1M vs WP Fastest Cache at 0.5M. I am not saying this is a definite factor that makes it better, but just in case you were wondering.

I nipped over to Google's PageSpeed Insights and without SiteSpeed I scored 63/100, I turned SiteSpeed on, did the analyze twice just as you said and my score bounced right up to 88/100! Now I'm looking at Google's other recommendations to see if I can get up to 90... (I'm going to compress a few images and see if that does it.)

I am looking for the sitespeed and I dont see it on my details page, could you please let me know if I will be able to have access, thanks.
Also now that I am here what its your opinion about have a forum in a site...and how does affect speed(performance)?
Thanks for all support

I keep it simple. I only use Google Pagespeed.
Before SiteSpeed I had a few plugins (as seeing in the training of Marcus1978) to speed up things and got in the high 70's
Then as suggested by Carson I removed all those plugins and enabled SiteSpeed and got high 80's
A few weeks later I haven't touched the sites and I'm getting scores in the 60's

I plan on waiting it out to see if it recovers as I'm pretty sure SiteSpeed is still undergoing rapid development.

Thanks so much Jurgen. Yes, I would imagine it is still developing and all good things take time. I will check out the training you mentioned as well. I know my site was acting very odd and support helped by deactivating a plugin that was causing issues. That is how I came to see Site Speed so will hang in as well.

You're very welcome. It's a great training and still viable on some points like the EWWW plugin. Just don't use any of the cache and javascript/css plugins as this should be handled by SiteSpeed. Cheers!

They didn't directly recommend a plug-in. They said the issue was with rendering javascript and gave me the 4 links to posts/questions from other members so I could fix it on my end. I read through all the posts and comments and W3 Total Cache was the plugin that was mentioned several times.

I no longer have the plug-in (put everything back the way it was) since it didn't work, but my numbers are still down this morning. I was at 86 (desktop) and 68 (mobile) before all this. Now I'm at 82 and 66 whether I have SiteSpeed on or off.

Would be really grateful to have this. My site went DOWN because of a caching plugin. Having something we know we can trust is huge. Thanks so much to support for getting my site back up and finding out the problem. In case you are wondering it was W3 Total Cache.

I heard a lot about the W3 Total Cache plugin as a "be-all, end-all" for speeding up my website. I compared it to SiteSpeed and SiteSpeed won hands down!

I also discovered that the Google PageSpeed test will give you different measurements depending upon the time of day and the amount of internet traffic there is. Evenings and weekends, during high traffic, delivers slower page speeds. Weekday mornings, during low traffic delivers higher page speeds...anywhere from 10 to 30 points higher!

SPECIAL NOTE: Make sure to DEACTIVATE the W3 Total Cache plugin BEFORE you turn on SiteSpeed or you will make the same mistake as I did and lock up your website. But, not to worry, a quick note to WA Support and they cleared my cache putting me back online in minutes!

Excellent post and excellent new technology under the hood I see. Proud to be here at WA.

If there is still beta availability than "I want the Beta please" for at least my main site as it is having very low scores on page speed reports of google (red and orange). If not, I will also understand, because at some point it will be released and then we will all get it anyway!

Wow, my site sucks at speed. Please set up beta. I am starting a new site and it would be good to start off right. If I can only have one, please start with howtoachievefinancialusccess.com. Hopefully, my new site will be up and running soon. Would have been today, but I had to tell everyone about sitespeed.

Hi, I wonder if members need to ask for this feature or it be added automatically?
It would be nice to join the SiteSpeed BETA. All the best:)
Update: Previously I checked my websites regarding SIteSpeed BETA. Nothing. After asking for it, I got it:) it took just 10 minutes, maybe less:)
Thank you:)

Hi Carson, thanks for including me into the beta. I just wanted to report that for two of my sites nothing has changed (speed is the same) and for my third site the mobile is gone up to 95 (yeah) but the desktop has gone down from 88 to 81. Any suggestion what went wrong there?
Thanks in advance!
By the way, I checked the sites for a few days now and always the same results.
Cheers Anke

I've noticed that I keep getting leverage browser caching notices for 3rd party js.. it seems to be the big issue with one of my sites along with optimizing images (3rd party affiliate links and banners)

The other site that does not have a lot of 3rd party affiliate links and such runs much faster (90/100).

Thanks for helping us get our sites' speeds up! I will keep looking at my first site and trying not to get myself locked out of my site anymore while doing so.

. Carson, of course, I want the BETA version of SiteSpeed. But more importantly, congratulations on the achievement.

I realize the amount of work and tech-knowledge-y that went into SiteSpeed, again congratulations!

The SiteSpeed in which the test site came up on my browser, Chrome, was amazing, virtually instantly. It will make our sites stand out and be clamored over. And make WA host server that website makers will want, for themselves as well as threir cIients. The concept is out of this world.

Hey Carson, I was wondering with the new EWWW image plugin, is there a way to put that on older sites, or do I just have to wait? I checked my page speed after the site speed and I still have images that say they should be compressed, should I look more into this or will it be fixed with WA's new updates?

Yeah, you can just install these. Search for it within your plugins and install. Then once activated, click the Media tab, under Bulk Optimize you will be able to optimize all of your existing images on your site.

This sounds very interesting, even if I am far from being technical I at least understand the concept and realize that speed is ever so important to visitors of your website. So yes please I would like this SiteSpeed. Thank you for being so extremely up to date.

I just enabled SiteSpeed, logged out of my site and went to page insights via an incognito window. I clicked on analyze 3 times and my site speed is still terrible (abysmal actually). Both Mobile and Desktop only went up by 2 points (and still in the red zone).

I am not sure if there is something you need to do on your end or if there is something else I need to do.

Wanted to give you a quick update here that your website Does have SiteSpeed running and it's loading your pages in a browser MUCH faster. However....

You have some plugins on the site that no optimization is going to be able to overcome. The problem with these plugins as mentioned in my response to your ticket, is that they connect to external servers, and as your pages are loaded, the page has to wait for those external connections every single time. So essentially, your website is waiting on servers out there to perform some kind of action, then they load.

Secondly, you've got ABSOLUTELY Massive amounts of images on the site, some of your pages have over 1MB of images on them. To download that amount of data takes a very long time and this is the main reason Google is scoring you so poorly.

I'm running some image optimization on your site now using the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin that I installed for you, however this will only help so much.

When adding images to your website, be conscious of the size of them. The image optimizer plugin will help optimize images for you as you upload in the future, so that should really give your site a boost in that respect.

SiteSpeed is doing a great job, it's caching your pages, it's combining your JS, minimizing CSS, and serving your websites with literally ZERO server latency - however, you've got layers and layers of plugins that likely aren't "required", and there's simply nothing we can do to prevent those plugins from reaching out to external servers, and running code on each page load.

Cut down on your plugins and you should see your Google PageSpeed insights scores go through the roof.

I just checked page speed again and it's gone down a bit (since I last checked a few hours ago). Mobile is now 64 (in the red) and desktop is 77.

Still much better than before the image optimization plugin and SiteSpeed, but not in the green yet.

That one large image you found must have slipped by me because as I mentioned, I manually have been optimizing my images and aiming to have them all under 100KB. Unfortunately many of the Pinterest images are between 100-200KB

The Eww image optimized plugin is being installed with all new sites but it's easy to install for yourself. Go to appearance, plugins, and then click add new. Type in Eeww image optimized and install it.

I appreciated the quick addition of this feature to the site I requested, but I'm afraid it seemed to be largely incompatible with the plugin page builder suite used on it (SiteOrigin Page Builder). I lost chunks of display and text formatting, and the site was rendered unusable. I was careful to turn off the caching plugin before activating and refreshed the site several times on my browsers, checking multiple pages (and refreshing those too). Both Explorer and Chrome exhibited the same issues. So unfortunately I had to turn off SiteSpeed and return to my prior setup. I don't know if other page builders experienced problems?

Also, it may have been the flurry of activity when this was introduced but to my eyeball test, it seemed all my sites were loading noticeably slower during this period too (from incognito windows and CTRL F5 refresh), but all's well now in that regard,

I hope you get these teething issues ironed out as it's certainly an excellent technical feature to offer, but not one I can take advantage of at the moment.

Hmm. I fell asleep reading to my son last night, so I guess I'm in too late for this. I look forward to trying it though because my speed is not great (62 mobile, 63 laptop). It is suggesting that I optimise images, which is weird because the only images I have are from Amazon links. Oh well.

All my images are optimized as well, except for the advertisement images. It keeps telling me to fix that. I think I will wait and see for a bit, but it did improve site speed remarkably for one of my sites and decently for the other. I still have one site with mobile at 32 and desktop at 76, so will keep fiddling with that.

Yeah, if there are some things that you have on your website that are causing errors, there is nothing you can do without removing that. For example, I had a "social" plugin on my website and I couldn't achieve over 85/85, I removed it altogether and I was getting 100/100 (which is hard to beat).

Just wanted to thanks very much for this upgrade. My speeds were in the low 60's and now I am up to 87 and in the green and if I fix one thing (got to figure out how to yet), it will be even faster. So thanks tons Carson for a great job!. :)

OMG, this is so exciting, I have a need for speed and WA sure is delivering on that. How can you be good looking and smart at the same time Carson, that is just not right or fair, Lol. You can only be one and that is the LAW of nature, LOL. I mean the good looking in a motherly way. Thanks!!!

Thanks. the value of WA just gets better and better continually since I first came here (and before, no doubt.) Being grandfather'd in at 2005 pricing is astounding because it was well worth it as it was back in that era!

Daniel

PS: I guess I missed the SiteProtect update. I found it when I went into SiteManager. With this here, I no longer need Akismet, correct? It would be another opportunity to retire a plugin. LOL! It's no wonder I stopped getting spam, which has been zero percent, and thinking Akismet had been perfected.

Thanks :) I was of the impression that only the first 100 folks requesting BETA would get it. I noticed another thing I've not seen before at SiteManager - all plugins to a website are listed. I'm going back over there to take a second look at this to see if it allows disabling plugins right from there.

Our SiteSupport team, myself included, answer questions very quickly and we are available 24 hours a day. It would be extremely rare to wait even a few hours to get a response. I'll have to look into this and see why this was the case.

Great website speeds with WordPress are very hard to achieve, it's why most web hosts out there are not able to boast about speed. That said, we took this as a challenge and went to the drawing board to build a platform out of hardware instead of software. Software (plugins) cannot produce speeds anywhere near what we can with the hardware setup of SiteSpeed.

Amazon web services are the best in the business, and there are many options for what kind of hardware you can get through them. Our setup uses servers provided through Amazon, but that does not mean that our service is "the same" as other. We utilize our hardware in a way that is very unique and the software that runs on these servers has been built line by line by us.

Website performance is measured by how you utilize the underlying hardware, not the hardware its self. Your website on our platform with SiteSpeed turned on will load faster than you've ever seen it load. Using a CDN like Cloudflare (at a cost to you) will not even come close to the speeds you'll achieve here with SiteSpeed.

If you would like to create a free SiteRubix.com website you can turn SiteSpeed on for it, then test your scores in Google Page speed insights, and in your browsers to see near instant page load times once your site is cached.

This is called service that a company is expected to offer to its clients.
Since WA a Domain and Web Host it's but proper for them to be competitive with other hosting companies, and when there is a new software or hardware added for efficiency everybody will be happy especially if it is free like this.

Our Hosting service here at WA is lightyears ahead of most web hosts out there and we've always run the risk of folks feeling like our hosting doesn't start up simply because it's "included" with the Premium membership. That said, there isn't a web host out there that is offering a service like we are here at WA for people installing WordPress sites.

Web hosts that are charging $199 per month for just a handful of WordPress installations do not offer nearly what we do here at WA, and we do it as part of the Premium membership. Our goal is to be the only company that you need to be involved in to run a highly successful online business, and to do that we need members of WA to have the BEST websites available!